Kravat shrugged. “Who can afford to live without working? Maybe you can—but none of us. We don’t want to bother you. It’s just your opinion we have to have, your medical opinion. For a claim the union is going to make against Vesely’s.”
“Against Lida Benda?”
“Yes.”
If Kitty weren’t around it would be so much easier to say No. And he had to refuse. Once you started, there would be no end to it. Tomorrow, they would call him for a real emergency, and day after tomorrow he would have to keep regular hours on Thomas’s lawn. And, of all things, to start doctoring again with a fight against Lida and Joseph—involving himself right off, on this side or that. He had chosen sides once, by Christ he had, and that had been enough.
He threw the problem to Kitty, as a last and probably futile resort. “Kitty—do you think I’m well enough to begin practicing?”
“No.” She lifted her face to his. “But that’s not what’s worrying you.”
“You’re right. It’s not,” he admitted.
Kravat was again picking up marbles. “Glass,” he muttered. “Blue and yellow glass—damn it!...Excuse me, ma’am.”
Blaha, thought Karel, with half a dozen kids and stooped shoulders and a small voice. Tireless and devoted and loyal. Years in the underground at his side—the side of Dr. Karel Benda, retired, currently a player of Chinese checkers.
“When would you want me, Kravat?”
“Tomorrow, at twelve sharp, in front of Vesely’s.”
He would give his medical opinion. That was his duty. But no more than that! Let them take his opinion and do with it what they pleased. “All right,” he said grudgingly.
Kitty took his hand. “Let’s go in for coffee, now. You’re sure, Mr. Kravat, that you won’t have a cup with us?”
“Oh, I’d like to, you know that, ma’am. But I really must get back to my furnace.”
Joseph counted his blessings. It was nice to do; it rarely happened that he could afford the leisure to sit back and think things through and do some rough accounting.
The currency reform had come, exactly as he had expected it would. Everybody’s old crowns, issued by the Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren, had been called in, and the fools who hadn’t been able to get rid of them now had large deposits in the banks and couldn’t touch their accounts. Every man Jack in the Republic had had to start out anew on an equal footing, with five hundred new crowns, no more. Except that those like himself, who had their money invested in plant and machinery and saleable merchandise, had beaten the racket. He had beaten it coming and going, because the money he had used to build up Benda and to fill his storage sheds wasn’t his own but the bank’s. He would repay it in devalued new crowns, one third the value of the loan he had taken out. It was a dog-eat-dog proposition, a rat race; he had been out of it for six years and had to make up for his losses; yet the six years had paid off, after all—they had given him a new approach, a fresh perspective that was most helpful.
He jotted down the figures of his gains. He was accustomed to dictating; when he wrote by hand, alone in a room, he cocked his head like a schoolboy, his lips moved, and his forehead puckered with concentration.
His gains were on paper, of course, and they wouldn’t be even that if some ignoramus in Prague or the district center of Limberk should insist on questioning the ownership of Benda. This fear had taken on almost physical form; it had a face like a nightmarish woodcut, it romped on his pad like a hobgoblin, scrambling the sensible, excellent, accurate figures on the white sheet before him.
He blinked and wiped his eyes. The figures were clear again. He drew a line and wrote down laboriously, Dolezhal: and in quotation marks, “I’ve spoken to the people in Limber. Everything is under control. Just a question of paper work”
Dolezhal was powerful—but how powerful was he with all of the country’s institutions constantly shifting, authorities in flux, forces maneuvering? Over the telephone, Dolezhal had sounded confident enough, emphasizing his words so decisively that Joseph could visualize the short, stabbing gestures of the small, white hand. “Nationalization? I’ve told you before, Benda—basic industries only, and in others from three to five hundred workers up.”
He must send Dolezhal that whisky decanter and dozen glasses, and give orders to have the design discontinued. It must be the only set of its kind, even though he would lose money by it. “You must come to Prague soon, Benda. I’ve talked to some of the men in my party about you, your personality, your ideas. They were very much impressed.”
At the time of the call, it had seemed like an aside. It didn’t, now that Joseph had analyzed every word, every shade of meaning in the Minister’s remarks. The world was not bounded by St. Peter, St. Anna, St. Maria, and St. Nepomuk. There was life outside the petty routine of a provincial manufacturer, even a successful one.
Perhaps he should get out of this rut of Rodnik, away from living and working with the unsmiling Lida, away from the stern, demanding eyes of his dead father’s portrait. Once he had had dreams of a different life; his father had buried them under. There had been Magda Tessinova of the National Theater—I wonder what became of her, I haven’t read of her since I came back. Dark-haired Magda, slim and olive-skinned and deep-voiced, what could you have expected her to do with a glassmaker from Rodnik except laugh at him?
Joseph drew another line. The pencil broke.
He walked unhurriedly over to Vesely’s Cut Glass, accepting the respectful greetings of the people, tipping his hat in return. The falling leaves were beginning to gather where the wind blew them into corners and against walls; he would have liked to drag his feet through them, to listen to the soft, scuffing sound this would make; but he didn’t.
He went straight into his wife’s office, the neatest, most impersonal office he had ever seen; even the potbellied stove in the corner looked as if, come winter, it would radiate prim cold instead of comfortable heat.
Three men were conferring with Lida. He asked himself why Karel was among them, but had little time to speculate. It could be nothing good—Kravat, that character from the Works Council at Benda, was there. The third person he did not know; it was probably a worker at Vesely’s.
Lida said, “I called you, but you had just left.”
Joseph hung up his hat. Lida had a simple hanger arrangement—a board on the wall, with wooden knobs sticking out. You had to hang your hat in a certain way or it would fall off; the thing annoyed Joseph every day.
“I’m usually here at one,” he said laconically. “What brings you here, Karel?”
“He’s been examining Blaha,” Lida supplied the answer. Her eyes were narrow; she was leaning slightly forward over the desk as if she were defending it; her permanent was fresh and the pins still stuck in the curls; her hair looked like the wig on a beauty parlor dummy.
“You’re Blaha?” asked Joseph, shaking the man’s hand and feeling it lumpy and misshapen in his own. “What’s wrong with you?”
Kravat, his baggy pants tucked into soldier’s boots, greeted Joseph casually and suggested, “Suppose we begin at the beginning.”
“Blaha has broken the bowl for Noukri Pasha,” Lida said flatly. “The sixth one in the set. We have no uncut spares; that means we’ll have to have new ones blown. All the expense!”
“Noukri Pasha—” said Joseph....Some fat oriental with six wives—a bowl for each one of them—who smoked a narghile in a cool garden with palm trees and who didn’t know what upsets he was causing in Rodnik.... “Yes, quite an expense!”
“But why did he break it?” said Kravat. “That’s precisely the point!”
“You’re here officially?” asked Joseph.
“I’m the executive secretary of the union.”
Joseph looked at him. He doubted whether Kravat could spell properly. “I thought you were just the head of my Works Council,” he said without particular rancor. “They’ve promoted you?”
Kravat smiled slightly. “I’ve been executive secretar
y since the liberation, Mr. Benda. We haven’t had any dispute with you—otherwise you might have known.”
“Are you planning to start one?” Joseph shot back.
This man Kravat had spoken mildly enough, but there was an undertone Joseph didn’t like, and he was going to put his foot down right here and now. He respected his workers; he respected Kravat as a melter; the man had a beautiful knack for adding just the right amount of the right material on a job for which only the vaguest kind of formulas existed—but this had nothing to do with his not knowing where he belonged.
Kravat was pulling a small cigarette holder out of his pocket, one of those cheap gadgets made of paper and a piece of goose quill, and was beginning to chew on it.
“I want to get along with my workers,” Joseph said programmatically. “You know that from my dealings with you people of the Works Council at Benda. I’m sure that my wife is of the same mind, as far as Vesely’s is concerned.”
“She wants to fire Blaha,” said Kravat, the holder still between his teeth.
Lida threw back her head. Not a curl on it moved. “What else can I do? Karel—you’ve looked at his hands....”
Joseph recalled the odd feel of Blaha’s hand; it had been like a dead rooster’s foot. He studied Blaha. A man in his best years—the face was distraught, the mouth hung half open, and once or twice, his Adam’s apple moved convulsively. Grinder’s Hand. Joseph needed no explanations from Karel; the man was through.
But Karel proceeded methodically, shutting out any personal feeling about Blaha, and letting the scientific evidence speak for itself.
“Look at his elbow—there’s a nerve here, the ulna nerve. Because the elbow is the focal point in grinding, this nerve is frequently damaged. When that happens, the muscles of the hand begin to atrophy.” He picked up Blaha’s limp hand and moved the crooked fingers. “See the grooves between the bones? See this?—the muscle between thumb and forefinger is almost gone!”
Blaha stared at his hand. His father had had such hands, and probably his grandfather, too. It came with age. After a certain number of years at the wheel—no one knew how many—your hands got that way.
Karel dropped the hand. “He’ll have to stop working. That’s the long and short of it.”
“Just as I told you!” insisted Lida. “A man’s health comes first. And we can’t afford this kind of breakage.”
“What’s he going to do instead?” asked Kravat.
“That’s the union’s affair,” Lida said with finality, and sat down behind her desk. “There is some insurance in such cases, isn’t there? I’ll tell the bookkeeper to make out the necessary forms.”
Karel contemplated his sister-in-law, her set mouth, her flat nose, her efficient hands with their square-cut nails. “He’s got a family to support—” he began, and immediately checked himself.
“It is the union’s affair,” confirmed Kravat. “We’re making it our affair. Right now.”
“Yes?” Lida flashed her silver tooth. “I’m afraid this isn’t the place. This is not one of your union meetings.”
She’s really a bitch, Karel thought. But Joseph won’t let her get away with it. Joseph is basically a decent person—if he weren’t, he would have made his peace with the Nazis as so many other businessmen had. And Joseph has some personal relation to his workers. If a man had worked for the Bendas all his life, Joseph would try to help him.
Karel waited. Joseph stood to the side, hands in his pants pockets, displaying boredom.
“I am sorry,” Blaha broke in. “I am sorry—”
“What are you sorry about!” Karel’s voice was tight.
Blaha frowned. What was he sorry about? How come the muscles in his hand were shriveling? The elbows—yes, the elbows....
“Dr. Benda!” Kravat had bitten through the goose quill and threw the cigarette holder into the wastebasket. “I would like to know if Blaha could work in some other capacity. Could he?”
Karel felt Joseph’s heavy-lidded glance. Joseph is faking, it went through his mind, reluctantly. That indifference is a front. Lida is fighting his little battle, and there’s more at stake than Blaha’s job. And I’m in the middle. They’ve put me on the spot again.
“Could he, Doctor?” pressed Kravat.
Blaha’s claw tugged at Karel’s sleeve, timidly. “But what will I be good for, Doctor? I’ve been a grinder all my life.”
He couldn’t shrug the man off. Nor could he be like Joseph and feign indifference in the face of the man’s harried, wounded eyes. “Blaha—” he said now this is my medical opinion: “You can work anywhere but at the grinding wheel.”
“Well, that settles it—” Kravat, boots squeaking, stepped closer to Lida’s desk. “It’s a simple thing, Mrs. Benda. You’ll employ him somewhere else at Vesely’s.”
“I’ve got a handyman and I’ve got a janitor. Do you want me to throw either of them out of work?...I’d like to help Blaha—believe me!” She had Kravat where she wanted him, and a little sympathy cost her nothing.
Karel saw that Kravat was caught. Kravat was in no position to recommend that one man be fired so as to place another. Karel still waited for Joseph. Joseph seemed to have fallen asleep on his feet.
“If you want to help the man, Lida—” Karel spoke heavily—“he could learn to paint glass, for instance. He still has some control over his fingers, and the likelihood is he’ll regain more of it, in time...”
“Paint?” Lida smiled thinly. “That’s very delicate work!”
“So he won’t do the fine designs! You have a big enough painting department at Vesely’s, Lida!”
“I could learn!” said Blaha. He tried to straighten his fingers. “I’d be a good painter. I’ve always been reliable.”
“I’m sure you’ll be a good painter!” Karel smiled broadly, his lip stretching over the space where his teeth were missing. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow he would take the train to Prague and have his mouth attended to. He saw Blaha struggle through to a hopeful grin; the grinder was back to being the dogged little man he had known. He had taken Blaha out of the status of a case. He felt elated, as after a climb to a hilltop, resting, and looking back.
“Are you trying to tell Lida how to run her business?”
This had come from Joseph.
Karel’s face went blank. “Why...no!” He floundered. “I’m just trying to act like a human being.”
“Human, but not quite practical,” Lida tossed in good-naturedly. “Blaha must learn to do something else—that’s sensible. Let him learn to paint glass, why not? But how is he going to support a family? He’ll have to start as an apprentice painter; it’ll take him a year, at least, before he’s any good at it—and meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile you’ll have to pay him something close to his old wage,” Kravat countered immediately. “We can’t have a man penalized because he gets sick working for you.”
Lida retorted, “That’s his risk. Everybody takes it. That’s why glass cutters get high rates.”
But Kravat was sure of himself, now. He had something he could fight, and Karel had made his line solid. “Before the war,” he began slowly, “and while you were operating under the Nazis—”
“Now, I wouldn’t put it that way, Mr. Kravat!” objected Joseph.
“While the Nazis were here,” Kravat went on, “your answer might have been all right. Now it’s no good. Blaha did his share for you; now you do yours for him.”
Joseph didn’t mind Lida being pulled down a peg or two. He didn’t mind Kravat talking tough; that was his job as a union official, and if he didn’t make a lot of noise, he wouldn’t be re-elected. But Karel was inexcusable.
“You won’t be offended if I ask you something, Karel?”
“No.”
Though his hands were still in his pockets, Joseph’s face now was alert. “You’re not back in practice, not that I heard of, Karel. You’re not earning a penny. Aren’t you a bit free with other people’s money?”
Whose m
oney? Who had made it for Lida? The questions were on Karel’s tongue. But he didn’t put them. He hadn’t come to fight Joseph, nor anybody. He said soberly, “I was called on to give a medical opinion.”
“Then stick to your medicine.”
“Medicine is more than giving pills. And you know it.”
“Is it throwing cues to Kravat? I’m sure Kravat is very capable of representing his own interests, and doesn’t need a Benda to help him...Mr. Kravat!” Joseph swung around. “There is no law obliging my wife to comply with your demand. Even our new Government recognizes that a private employer is not a social welfare agency.”
He sat down on the corner of the desk, his back shielding Lida.
Kravat said, “If there isn’t such a law, there ought to be one!”
Joseph’s foot described small circles. “I quite agree with you. If I had anything to say about it, I’d be the first one to propose a law to take care of cases like Blaha’s.”
Karel refused to take Joseph’s dismissal. “The fact still remains that Blaha was disabled working for Vesely’s,” he said sharply.
“Worked here for fifteen years!” added Kravat.
Patiently, Joseph tried a new tack. “That’s the narrow view,” he expounded. “The glass that Blaha cut in these fifteen years has gone through many hands. Many people have profited by it and made a living. The money Blaha earned he’s spent in many ways—again, a great number of people profited by it and made a living. It isn’t Vesely’s that owes him help, now—it’s all of us....”
Karel was puzzled. Was Joseph trying to soft-soap Kravat? Or was he merely spurting ideas to any handy audience because he no longer could spurt them to Thomas?
Joseph’s hands were sweating in his pockets. He was amazed at himself, at the ease with which he had spun out his amateur social theory, at the logic with which his thoughts followed one another. And what he had spoken was the gospel truth! From under his lids, he tried to gauge his listeners’ reactions. Kravat appeared doubtful, but somewhat bewildered; and the edge seemed to be off Karel’s animosity....Maybe he was good at this kind of thing, and did have a flair for politics. Maybe he should have a bigger audience. Maybe Dolezhal was right!
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